The Glif via Kickstarter.com and 3D Printing

In class last week, my students and I discussed the current state of the art in rapid and early prototyping. While large corporations routinely use prototyping to accelerate product development, we also discovered how prototyping can help fledgling entrepreneurs to "fail fast" or, alternatively, "succeed quickly". One of my bright students dug a little deeper in his learning and exploration of the topic and came across this short BBC-produced video that highlighted many of the WATAs (aka "walk away take aways") from our class discussion.

If you choose to watch the video, see if you can find evidence of any of these topics/concepts:

1. rapid prototyping
2. failing fast
3. crowdsourcing (via kickstarter.com)
4. 3D printing
5. from concept to consumer
6. the old manufacturing as compared to the new manufacturing
7. initial order fulfillment
8. accelerated growth (i.e., the snowball effect)

The Glif story is an intentionally short and interesting one about a novel idea for a consumer product whose development cycle was accelerated by crowdsourcing and 3D printing. To learn more about the product and its creators, Tom Gerhardt and Dan Provost, check out their website.

I love it when students take the course outside of the classroom and help all of us learn more about the topic. Well done, Mitch!